Drunken Monkeys: How Our Thirst For Booze May Have Evolutionary Roots

It’s happened to all of us. It’s 3 pm on a Friday and all you can think about is how hard you’re going to hit happy hour the millisecond you get out of work. OK, maybe it’s noon on a Wednesday and you’re thinking it. Hell, maybe it’s Monday and you just went straight to the bar that morning. Regardless, while your eagerness for a frosty pint or cocktail may feel like a simple lack of discipline, it may actually have an evolutionary basis. In his new book The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol, Robert Dudley argues that early primates may have learned to associate the smell of alcohol with ripe fruit, and that this may explain our taste for the sauce.

The proposed connection between the smell of alcohol and edible fruit has to do with the chemistry of an apple, mango, or pear once it’s ripe. As a fruit is ripening, yeast breaks the fruit’s sugar down into ethanol, which in common speech is the stuff we call “alcohol.” Over generations of searching for food on the forest floor, animals may have eventually started using this alcoholic scent as a signal for ripe fruit. …read more